welcome

There is an outside and an inside to the life of adventure so I pay attention to politics and spirituality. If you’re looking for a life of adventure, we’re on the same wave length. Writing is my adventure and how I discover what I know. I’m just attempting to go further and live deeper—trying to say what I have to say without presumption or histrionics.

If you suspect that happiness and fulfillment take practice and patience, I hope you’ll join the exploration and make it a conversation. Given the state of the world, we need to explore and discover a lot—fast.

To burn brilliantly in a life of service, we need the warmth and light of a grounded spirituality. My mission is to write from a heart that loves the real world—honoring all comers, listening before speaking, telling the truth, learning until the day I die, suggesting ways to “live on both sides of our skins.” It’s an alternative to the tournament of lies. But it takes practice and there’s still a lot of churning.

Our world, changing times, and how we’re evolving are always simmering in the back of my mind. A more humane future is hastened by our impatience with the world’s chronic injustices and invented in the ruminations and ponderings we’re willing to share. I’m deeply interested in what’s going on in other people’s lives and simmering in the back of their minds. I hope you will share your thoughts and wonderings.

Don’t be shy. I hate platitudes and thrive on candid give and take. My ego is under control and I learn by listening. Let’s talk about what’s important.

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5 Responses to welcome

Thank you for your descriptions of some wild areas that I have never seen. It has been a year now since I have been able to get “off the pavement”. I miss it and your writing has given me a taste until I am well enough to go off road again.

david sir,
probably talking a different way. Ironwood, Apostle Islands, Pictured Rocks, sea water, Rockies, wolf-moose predator studies all create suggestions, if not tensions, of me v. an eternal. These 6 items are religious in their provocation of thought. This thought can stay in the immediate vista or perhaps edge into self reflection. Why, who, where, what of me. An incarnation is possible every time if some quiet realization exists of the infinite within me and within everything I see/touch/feel/smell/hear. This paper suggests that the involuntary will to live is rooted within much of what I do. Will to live could be coded identity. Its strength per the noted energy. I am just presenting a pair of authors who approach this biologic identity energy from their religious perspectives. I merely widen it out a bit. Thank you sir.

“God is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions that Run the World – and why their Differences Matter,” and Wendy Doniger”s Other Scholar’s Myths: The Hunter and the Sage” in Other Peoples’ Myths respectively present facts and metaphors to detail their particular thoughts regarding humanity’s forms and formations of religion.
Prothero says “each religion articulates; a problem, a solution…a technique…. an exemplar who chart this path from problem to solution.” Religion has Christian sin and Buddhist suffering while Hinduism and Judaism move to the narrative. Hindu’s many gods juxtapose Christianity’s one God. Christian sin or Buddha suffering is a heavy yoke to their respective believers. But Christianity and Buddhism have their appropriate solutions. Christianity has “faith and good works” [Prothero, 14]. Buddhism has the “Eightfold Path. [Prothero, 14].
But they are not different paths up the same mountain to a god of love. Prothero thinks such multi-culturalism is “reimagining” [Prothero, 6.] religion. Instead realism requires an examination of religion’s sins as well as its grace. Sikhs killed Indira Gandhi and the Sunni Shia slaughter continues unabated. Religion is a power for tremendous good and likewise, tremendous evil.
Doniger starts with myths and echoes. She suggests we do the proverbial moccasin walk, albeit at times we seem to “arrange our talents and weaknesses like the foolish blind man and the lame man…the lame man carried the blind man on his shoulders.” We may walk in another’s moccasins and carry another’s burden, but our ethnocentricity can miss the other’s message.
Doniger runs the metaphysical energies of hunter and sage inside her mind and her readers mind to emphasize that whether our residence lies within the dreams of another or within our dreams, that “how impossible…how irrelevant it is to attempt to determine the precise level of consciousness at which we are existing.” The hunter experiences life through physical interaction with life’s agents. The sage attempts to enter the minds of life’s agents. But neither hunter nor sage is privy to the peculiar invisible in the other.
Sages run the risk of getting inside the mythmaker mind and take on the myth of another. The absorbed myth may take up residence in the heart of the sage, “an enterprise that always affects the construction of a scholar’s worldview…may also affect one professional scholarship (the life as a sage).” [Doniger, 16.] The sage may feel the power of the other’s myth but must know the myth is different for believers and non-believers. Doniger observes both a “moral relativism” [Doniger, 20.] and an “ontological relativism” [Doniger, 20.] could exist within myth but examinations thereof can allow even more clarity in recognizing personal and societal bias. This clarity could permit an “eclecticism in personal cosmologies” to understand oneself and the other in matters of life and its powerful construct, religion.
Prothero and Doniger move me to ask why religion exists? For myself, before community structure, the actor exists. The actor moves to pair, to family, and family to band. Certainly band moves to nation, to country. Singular becomes plural and humanity becomes community.
Attachment Theory and the Evolutionary Psychology of Religion by Lee A. Kirkpatrick of the College of William and Mary says “attachment system…reliably develops in all humans…by attending to environmental information about the proximity of the primary caregiver and cues of potential danger.” Parental attachment increases survival chances. The noted family and band are kin, developing methodology and rule to increase survival. Adjacent neighboring kin prompts “social exchange…reciprocal altruism” [Kirkpatrick, 237.]
The god, myths, rituals, and ritual makers could be an answer to the existential question of what are life’s meanings, the temporality of life, and present permanence of death. An attachment point for protection from the perils of the unexplained and vicissitudes of life might be the gods, Shiva, myths, and rituals, ad infinitum. Proportions of pleasure and pain reside in proximity or distance to the attachment figure, to their displays of methodology. Methodology’s displays certainly include religion with its gods, canons, and ritual makers.
Prothero describes the what, the external and varying display of good and evil within religion. Doniger weaves a pair of actors, hunter and sage, into an eclectic cosmology for examination of gods, myths, and moods. I am trying to suggest upstream of both is the human biologic will to live.